Never run out of blog topic ideas
As a content specialist, it’s your job to always have blog content at your fingertips. But what happens when you run out of ideas? You could read some blog prompts for inspiration or look at competitors…
Or, you could set yourself up for success from the get-go. Integrate these three methods and watch the game change. You’ll never run out of topics again, and you’ll probably have even better ideas.
Perform a content inventory.
Taking inventory of your content means listing each web page and its details. I like to use either Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Moz to crawl my website and export. The crawler will generate details like the meta data, status, and word count for each page.
But these details aren’t what’s important. You need to categorize these pages in a way that’s meaningful to you. I like to add columns for content type, persona, topic, and buyer journey.
Once the content is categorized in this way, you can easily find gaps. Are you thin on decision phase content?
I might notice that I have plenty of SEO blogs in the decision phase and need more in the awareness phase. Now, I have a starting point to brainstorm topics.
Regularly perform keyword research.
Stay up-to-date on your keyword research and review suggestions in tools like Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest. Or, take a pain point driven keyword approach. In my persona keywords guide, you’ll find a proven strategy to come up with new and creative content ideas.
Writing blogs to rank for specific search terms means adding value to your writing.
Start a content repurposing strategy.
You can also use your content inventory to build a repurposing strategy. That’s because for every topic you write about, you should be able to create a version for a different content type. The content inventory helps you see all the topics and content types in one place, so you can decide where to repurpose.
Examples of content repurposing:
Turn your About page into a blog post
Break one of your eBooks into multiple blog posts
Create collections of related content. For example, I created a blog post that summarizes relevant blog posts for content strategists.
Don’t be concerned about having similar content living in multiple places. People might find a blog post about email metrics from a social media post. They might find a service page about email marketing through an organic search. For this reason, it’s beneficial to have similar content living in multiple places.
Just remember, repurposing means drawing inspiration from another piece of content - not duplicating.
Create a company culture of blog contribution.
When you have other people feeding ideas, you’re going to have more diversity in topics. Plus, you’ll have easy access to ideas when you’re stuck.
One way to gather content ideas is to hold regular brainstorms. Invite subject matter experts who can really dive deep into a topic.
In place of brainstorms, it might be even more effective to create a channel for others to dump their blog ideas. This might be a project board, a shared doc, or a chat group. Whatever the channel may be, make sure it’s easy to find. Send frequent reminders to gather info in this channel so that it doesn’t get lost.
A culture of content creation generates results.
Employing these strategies helps you keep momentum and stick to a consistent schedule easily. As an added bonus, other departments won’t bother you as much with - “How are you coming up with meaningful blog ideas? Are they just off the top of your head?”
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